Just a word now and then about working in a prison and for the Department Of Corrections. Plus a good bit of ranting here and there.

Sunday, September 16, 2012

Educational Television

The offenders, those who aren't in the Hive anyway, all have cable teevee in their cells. Paid for by the canteen fund. That is, by the inmates themselves (or their families) and not the taxpayers. It's basically a free babysitter.

Come sit on the yard on Superbowl Sunday. There will be about two offenders out there. Everyone else will be inside plastered to their teevee sets. Anyway.

They have basic cable. No movie channels. No Cinemax or Showtime of HBO. Not even the Playboy channel. The poor mistreated things.

Other than that nobody really monitors what they are watching. It is, after all, an adult institution.

Except for the two treatment houses, anyway. In neither one of those houses are they allowed to watch any of the music channels. No MTV, VH-1, BET or CMT. Too much sex for one house and too much drugs and alcohol for the other.

But that's beside the point.

Tonight I heard that a bunch of offenders in one wing were watching "Lockup-Raw" and I thought to myself "I've watched that show. Hey, I learned things to look for. I wonder what kind of things they might be learning?"

I saw things like how prison made weapons are manufactured and hidden. How staff members were set up and assaulted. How escape attempts were made and why they failed. How contraband stuff like drugs and cell phones were smuggled in and how they were hidden.

Do we really want inmates in our penitentiaries watching these shows? It's just basically like Sesame Street for inmates.

Of course if I tried to complain through channels they would just tell me I'm being paranoid. And that there's nothing can be done about it anyway.

12 comments:

WOW - you'd think that this would be a no brainer. However, I think what it should be is "a brainer" and someone in upper management should grow "a brain" and use it...geez louise...who's running these prisons anyway.

Jenny Lou- Prisons are mostly run by people who have never really worked inside of them, unfortunately. And by people scared to death to take anything away from the useless little nits for fear of a lawsuit.

Probably irrelevant, since i have little access to "the internet" .. but am fascinated by "news" stories telling me that there are "riots" over a rather pathetic 13 minute video posted in July, with no response.